> All of that being said I think the use case for blockchain is probably quite narrow.
Name one, I dare you.
Name something that really matters. That will offset all the damage they do.
Name one, I dare you.
Name something that really matters. That will offset all the damage they do.
Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) that are new and experimental forms of company formation. See DXdao https://dxdao.eth.link/#/
Compound, a large player in the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) space that allows anyone to borrow against their crypto holdings https://compound.finance/
The craziest part of Hacker News is the near universal opposition to cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. It is not going away, and governments are finally bending to reality and accepting it, rather than banning Bitcoin and similar outright.
There is no better way that a developer can earn outsized riches than blockchain and cryptocurrency. You are solving tough problems in difficult, constrained environments and are rewarded extremely well for doing so by a global group of investors involved in this alternative financial system.
But please, if you don't like crypto, just build whatever SaaS bullshit an MBA is telling you to and take your 0.1% equity for busting your ass. I have spent years in the extraordinarily interesting world of blockchain and have been rewarded extremely well in terms of personal growth, education, and financial rewards.
You are not rewarded for "solving tough problems" or anything else related to creating actual value. It's FOMO driven gambling, scams and enabling organized crime that gets money into the crypto ecosystem.
I'll take US Treasury notes any day for "long term store of value". If the United States gets to the point where they can't honor Treasury notes, we will have much bigger problems on our hands anyway.
Another thing to consider, most users of bitcoin or whatever else generally relies on exchanges to get out what they are really after, US Dollars. The end game is to see which sucker will buy your tokens for more than you paid for it, then you can cash out. But to that end, we kinda have to trust the exchanges as well, and there are many cases of fraud that have happened at that level, which shakes trust in such a system.
Now if we are being intellectually honest here and asking ourselves if bitcoin and its ilk is good for something like speculation or even as the basis for treating it as an "exchange" for transferring money (albeit a rather low performing one at that compared to other established systems like SWIFT), then I can potentially see the benefit in that, even if I personally have no real use case for it.
Second, the fact that it’s ONLY use is as a long term store of value is red flag for being a GOOD long term store of value. If there is an adverse economic situation (which is one of the primary times you are going to want to tap into that long term source of value), the price is going to collapse... because everyone will be needing to pull OUT of the store, and no one will be wanting to buy.